Tagged: kenickie

With riot grrrl now approaching the status of a heritage industry, not to mention Courtney Love’s current incarnation as the post-grunge Norma Desmond, it can be hard to recall that both of them helped me find my feminist footing on the slippery rocks of a ’90s girlhood. This is a roundabout remembrance of how it happened.

I.

The arts have long been a space for radical expression by women, even if the extent of that radicalism has often gone under-acknowledged. In 1915, the author and journalist Dorothy Richardson produced Pointed Roofs, credited as the first English stream of consciousness novel, using an innovative prose style which she saw as necessary for the expression of female experience. Virginia Woolf observed that Richardson ‘has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender’. If Richardson’s challenge to linguistic convention in her writing has musical counterparts, one of them is the ‘new, raw and female’ sound made possible by post-punk. Punk removed barriers of precedent and technical expertise to engagement in music, enabling trips into less-charted musical and lyrical territory. But it was in the subsequent voyage of discovery that was post-punk that punk’s revolutionary potential really bore fruit, and the untried, experimental nature of post-punk music was particularly suited to women.

1. I wrote this piece for the Wales Arts Review on Welsh history, politics and identity. Yes, again.

2. In the next issue of Planet: the Welsh Internationalist, I have written on the relationship between Welsh artists and London in the very poor disguise of an album review.

3. If you’re at this year’s Green Man, I will be there to speak to ex-Kenickie members Emma Jackson and Marie Nixon on music, gender, class, the 90s, you know the drill. My life as outtake from Phonogram continues. I shall endeavour not to use the term “escapist proletarian-glam aesthetic” more than once but can’t promise anything.

1. As a coda to my overthinking-it series of posts on Welsh history, identity, and the Manics, I did an interview with Studio Hiraeth on roughly the same themes; it is here.

2. The Quietus ran a piece from my upcoming rant about representations of class and gender in the 90s, featuring Shampoo and Kenickie. (By the way, if you thought that was tenuous overthinking-it pseudo-academic bollocks, wait till you read my take on S*M*A*S*H.) The band themselves have all been positive about it, which makes me wish I had some means of time-travelling back a decade or so to tell my late-teenage self to cheer the fuck up.

3. Sticking with 90s nostalgia, this Wales Arts Reviewinterview with Simon Price is a good read, if bleak and suspicion-confirming.

So the next scheduled Apocalypse isn’t until October. Good; I have stuff to do before October, but little to do after it, and at the current rate of Armageddon I won’t need to pay off my student loan. More importantly, Dylan was 70 on Tuesday.

One of my favourite theories/lies/facts about Dylan is that the lyrics to ‘It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ consist of titles or opening lines for other songs which Dylan felt he wouldn’t have time to write before nuclear conflagration moved these matters rather lower down everyone’s list of concerns. In similar manner – and because I’m quite aware that most of my writing is what you’d get if you fed ‘The Libertines’, ‘class war’, ‘wank’, ‘appalling pun’, and ‘cultural history’ into a Random Lyrics Generator – here is a blog post consisting of titles for other blog posts which I doubt I’ll ever get around to writing. Only about two of these are serious proposals, of course, and the rest self-parodic. But the two keep changing. Continue reading →

Seen Ten O’Clock Live, then? …Yeah. Breathlessly billed as Britain’s answer to the Daily Show, a return to the satirical standard set by 1962’s groundbreaking That Was The Week That Wasand the grand guignol glory days of Spitting Image, with hype like that the show was perhaps doomed to fall short of expectations.

I’d be failing in my daytime duty as a till-jockey if I didn’t let you all know that peerless proletarian Sunderland sensation Lauren Laverne has branched out into the book world. I don’t know what kind of book I’d expected her to write – possibly a Jackie Collins style bonkbuster set among the highs and lows of Britpop, with a severely metaphorical cover depicting a swirl of glitter round a bathtub plughole – but what she’s actually come up with is the first in a series of children’s books, Candy and the Broken Biscuits.

No, I haven’t read it. But the title made me smile for what I presume is a reference to Pulp’s ‘Mis-Shapes’, a song which cushioned every fall of my adolescence. The series’ title itself, less happily, brought back repressed memories of Bis, who only had one good song, and it wasn’t this one. I guess you can take the girl out of the 1990s but you can’t take the 1990s out of the girl.

Like this:

While the 1990s weren’t the greatest decade for feminist comings of age, as a small-town girl who loved her music, I didn’t do too badly. I’d grown up on the leftovers of punk, awed and enthralled by women like Poly Styrene, Patti Smith, Ari Up and Gaye Advert. Closer to home, I had Shampoo’s deadpan, dead-eyed bubblegum-punk and Kenickie’s bracing uber-proletarian blend of grit and glitter.